This project is a comparative study of ethnic identifications and the functions, change, and persistence in such identifications reflecting structural and situational variables within an area of rural Wisconsin. This study will concentrate upon two neighboring communities, their interrelations and their relation to the regional urban center. The first community was settled by Italians, the second by Norwegians, at approximately the same period in the mid-nineteenth century. Both communities remain predominantly of the same ethnic background as that of their respective pioneers. Both communities consist of both townsmen an farmers in the surrounding countryside. Thus two groups, one usually considered "ethnic" and the other as "assimilated" into the White Protestant majority will be compared and analyzed. Each population will have addressed to it the questions. "Do they identify themselves in terms of their ethnic background? Are they so identified by others? Under what circumstances are other identifications utilized, such as those of social class and religion? How do these identifications relate to social institutions, informal groups, and social networks and the material and social resources of the area?" The theoretical and methodological framework for this research reflects and is guided by F. Barth's analysis of ethnicity. This framework is modified and supplemented by M. M. Gordon's concept of "ethclass" and his conceptual distinction between acculturation and assimilation. Finally, since an aspect of the problem of identification may be viewed as a problem in folk social classification, ethnoscientific techniques will be utilized in an effort to describe an analyze the relevant systems of terminology.